proposed amendment<\/a> (see page 4) suggests limiting data centers to the HM-Heavy Manufacturing and MC-Manufacturing Commercial zoning districts through a conditional use hearing before City Council.<\/p>\nThe city\u2019s zoning currently does not address data centers, which means that prior to the curative amendment process, a developer could have placed a data center in any zoning district.<\/p>\n
The proposed ordinance requires a minimum of 5 acres on which a data center could be located and will determine a minimum setback requirement.<\/p>\n
The ordinance also deals with specific details regarding water usage, electricity and noise\/vibrations.<\/p>\n
Jerome Skrincosky, the city\u2019s planning consultant from Hawk Valley Associates, reviewed maps of the MC and HM districts to determine if data centers could realistically be placed within those areas using setbacks of 200 to 500 feet.<\/p>\n
Skrincosky said a task force in the planning office will make a final recommendation on the setback distances.<\/p>\n
Planner Peter Rye said he believes many of the details in the proposed ordinance are overreactive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would suggest that there might be an easier way to define what the target is that we’re interested in regulating,\u201d Rye said. \u201cI think everybody is assuming that if we do not regulate things, a big facility will be built in in the city of Reading, and I don’t know how likely that is to occur.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if there was somebody who wanted to build a small facility here, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for the local economy,\u201d Rye added.<\/p>\n
Rye said the concerns about noise and vibration and other environmental effects should not be any different than they are for a factory building.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know that making it specifically rigorous for data centers is the solution,\u201d Rye said.<\/p>\n
Skrincosky said many things in the proposed ordinance are overreactive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were initiated based upon reaction that we’re seeing,\u201d Skrincosky said. \u201cThis is in the news every day, over and over again.\u00a0\u00a0There are so many variables in here that have been put in for a purpose. Yes, some of them may be overreactive, but they are they are placed in here for good measure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first and most important thing is we’re not trying to regulate data centers that are accessory to a functional use or principal use,\u201d he explained. \u201cThis is for a data center as a principal use, whether it be a hyperscale model or something smaller. Again, a lot of people were talking in circles about telecommunications in the 1990s.\u00a0\u00a0People thought that telecommunication facilities would destroy the world, and they didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
The planning commission plans to have a special meeting in October when it will vote to forward the proposed ordinance to the county planning commission for comments before it comes back to the city planning commission for its approval and recommendation to City Council.<\/p>\n
The final step is approval from City Council, which must be completed within the 180-day time frame, which places the deadline in early January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2013\u00a0The Reading Planning Commission met in its monthly workshop meeting Tuesday night with a sole agenda…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[104066,1609,2116,48255,112974,106587,128,1095,130,129,12958],"class_list":["post-267964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-ai-data-center","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-data-centers","tag-jerome-skrincosky","tag-opposition-to-ai-data-centers","tag-peter-rye","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-council","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-planning-commission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}